By 100 Days of Real Food, on August 30th, 2010 For the first time in 3 months I had a drink from Starbucks today! I must thank a friend who, during her 10-day pledge, learned Starbucks offers honey as an  alternate sweetener. Without knowing that I would have never stepped foot in there. The thing is, I am not a regular old coffee drinker. I (used to) like their highly sweetened white chocolate mocha, and I knew I couldn’t go anywhere near that during our pledge. So armed with this new information, I wanted to try to order a drink sweetened with honey that would hopefully still taste good. I ended up getting a latté (which is simply espresso and milk….a mocha is also made with espresso and milk, but has the sweet chocolaty syrups added too) and asked them to add two little packets of their honey. It was surprisingly delicious! I do wonder though if I would have liked it this much before our 100-day pledge? You see…over the last 90 something days, our palates have changed!
I can honestly say that the change in our palettes has been one of my favorite outcomes of doing this pledge. Not only do I now think a little bit of honey in my mocha is just as satisfying as 2 to 3 times as much of the flavored sugary syrup I used to love, but my kids will actually eat PLAIN yogurt now too! Continue Reading »
By 100 Days of Real Food, on July 12th, 2010 Since we started our 100 Days of Real Food pledge eating at restaurants has become quite a challenge, but we have also learned a lot from the experience. Below are some tips and suggested meals if you also want to try to stick to whole foods while eating out.
General Tips:
- Avoid bread items such as rolls, breadcrumbs, tortillas, pasta, breading, crusts, etc. Unfortunately even if something is called “whole-wheat” it is rare to find items that are truly only made with 100% whole-wheat (unless the restaurant can confirm the ingredients for you).
- If the waiter/chef doesn’t know (and can’t find out) the ingredients of an item then they probably don’t make it fresh in house which means it likely has all sorts of stuff (like sweeteners and preservatives) in it you don’t want or need.
- If they don’t know where the meat came from then I can guarantee it is not from anywhere special (like a grass-fed local farm).
- For children Continue Reading »
By 100 Days of Real Food, on July 9th, 2010 Trying to eat out at restaurants has become somewhat of a joke. It is no longer about what menu items sound appetizing or might be in my price range…it is all about narrowing things down to the 1 or 2 items that we can eat. Last night my husband and I went on a little “date night”, and we chose a fairly nice French restaurant for dinner. It always seems that at first glance there appear to be quite a few things we can order off the menu, but once we sit down and take a closer look we have to keep narrowing things down further and further. This is some of our conversation at dinner last night… Continue Reading »
By 100 Days of Real Food, on June 20th, 2010 Today was the first time I have eaten in a restaurant (other than Earth Fare’s café) since starting our 100 Days of Real Food. My husband has of course eaten out quite a few times on business trips, but I was obviously not there. Once again today, we were out running errands longer than expected and realized we needed to feed our girls some lunch. I normally like to research these types of things in advance and have a plan, but today I did not. I tried not to look when we passed by Chic-Fil-A (knowing how easy that would be), but we just had to continue on hoping that some sort of solution would magically appear!
We spotted the first contender, and I ran in to scope out the menu. Continue Reading »
By 100 Days of Real Food, on June 4th, 2010 Last night a friend of mine asked me if I am having to cook a lot…and the answer to that is YES. I feel like I am running my dishwasher at least two times a day (it used to be only once a day), but some days I do manage to get more of a break from the kitchen than others. This is one of the harder things to deal with when you are not eating much of anything that is store-bought. There are unfortunately not very many choices other than just cooking yourself. I am trying to get better at making things that we can not only eat, but also freeze for later (or have leftover) so I will have some nights off, but that is about the only thing I found that helps so far.
So this brings me to why going out to lunch this week was oh so exciting (for me at least). Continue Reading »
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alternate sweetener. Without knowing that I would have never stepped foot in there. The thing is, I am not a regular old coffee drinker. I (used to) like their highly sweetened white chocolate mocha, and I knew I couldn’t go anywhere near that during our pledge. So armed with this new information, I wanted to try to order a drink sweetened with honey that would hopefully still taste good. I ended up getting a latté (which is simply espresso and milk….a mocha is also made with espresso and milk, but has the sweet chocolaty syrups added too) and asked them to add two little packets of their honey. It was surprisingly delicious! I do wonder though if I would have liked it this much before our 100-day pledge? You see…over the last 90 something days, our palates have changed!
